Computer-Mediated Anthropology
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An Online Resource Center |
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CMA Methodology: Cache Garbology by Noah Porter, 2004 |
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What is Cache Garbology? "Trash is an inevitable side effect of an industrialized society. Its production is unavoidable and its composition may surprise most people. Shortly after the first Earth Day twenty-five years ago a team of archaeologists from the University of Arizona developed a program to apply the tools and techniques previously reserved for the study of ancient civilizations to the refuse of a modern society" (May 1995 ). And for those who do not know about Internet browser caches already, "Almost all web browsers maintain a local copy of web pages and other related items on your disk or memory to speedup reloading of previously visited pages from the Internet" (Chami.com 2004 ). Put them together, and you dig through unwanted files. For all I know, researchers in other disciplines have already discovered, popularized, and named this method. However, other than vaguely recalling something similar being referred to as "Internet archaeology" (I do not remember the source where I encountered that term, unfortunately), my first exposure to this method came from one of my responses to the CMA survey. Credit goes to James Stewart of Columbus State Community College for passing this information on to me: Students have used computers to administer web-based surveys. One He discovered a fondness for American sports. For the information collected not to be personally identifying, it would have to come from shared computers, as that student apparently did. However, it is still possible that in the course of looking through caches, some personally-identifying information may emerge. This therefore begs the question: how should this ethically be handled? In addition, there are issues of interpretation to be considered. Hodder (2000) writes: "It has often been assumed, for example, in the archaeology of historical periods, that written texts provide a 'truer' indication of original meaning than do other types of evidence...Indeed, Western social science has long priveleged the spoken over the written and the written over the nonverbal...Somehow it is assumed that words get us closer to minds. But as Derrida has shown, meaning does not reside in a text but in the writing and reading of of it" (p. 704). An internet cache is created in a particular context, namely, someone sitting at a computer looking at Internet sites. That much is obvious. But perhaps less obvious when compared to written documents and records is that unlike obtaining a marriage certificate or writing in a diary, the creation of an Internet cache occurs automatically as the person browses. A technologically uninformed person may not even realize that a cache is being created. A more tech-savvy person, aware that a record is being created of his or her Internet usage, may either avoid sites that he or she would feel shame or embarassment at looking at because of this, or may look and delete the cache afterwards. References Cited Chami.com Hodder, Ian May, Herman |
